from Nicole Serrin:
historic 1912 bungalow in the Roosevelt historic district: 3 bed, 1.75 bath, 1702 sq ft; carefully restored. $775,000 [48 W. Willetta St.]
1930 Tudor Revival home in the Medlock Place historic district: 2 bed, 2 bath, 1795 sq ft, with a separate 532 sq ft studio or guest house. Lot is big – just under half an acre. $747,000
1935 Tudor Revival with some Mission features in the F.Q. Story historic district: 2 bed, 1 bath, 1152 sq ft; lots of neat detail. $330,000
I find that all of the National Park Service’s Preservation Briefs are interesting, and several have been especially useful in my own home repair projects; take, for instance, brief #33, which I had reason to consult this past month. It’s a general primer on historic stained glass, written specifically for those of us with stained glass windows or panels in our old homes and the need to either maintain or repair them. Neal Vogel & Rolf Achilles‘ essay on historic stained glass windows is full of extensive information on history, dating, identifying and documenting, composition (even going a bit into chemistry and other materials sciences issues), ways to halt deterioration, tips on photographing stained glass and various repair techniques. If you have stained glass in your home, you need to read this. And, like all the other briefs, it’s full of useful technical information but not written in an overly-technical style; it’s accessible, readable and (as always) interesting.
A recent article by Ellen Tomson in Minneapolis’ Pioneer Press describes local historian and author Larry Millett’s research and subsequent book on Minneapolis’ historic neighborhoods. excerpt:
Larry
Millett biked the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis for three summers
to produce his latest book, (the) AIA Guide to the Twin Cities, the first
major neighborhood-by-neighborhood handbook of its kind.But the foundation of his 665-page book was decades of
research and writing about the Twin Cities, first as a Pioneer Press
reporter, columnist and critic, and then as author of Lost Twin Cities"The book is the result of three years of work and, in a sense,
it’s the work of a lifetime since I’ve worked here all my life," says
Millett, 59, who grew up in North Minneapolis and has spent much of his
adult life in St. Paul.
I was going through SFGate.com’s home section archive and found this great piece by R.W. Apple, Jr. (the New York Times‘ architecture critic), originally published in that paper in 2003:
"Westward the course of empire takes its way," wrote the 18th century
Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, so the 19th century founders of a
little city directly across the bay from San Francisco, almost at the western
extremity of the American empire, chose to name it after him.Many famous men and women have walked its streets — Ernest O. Lawrence,
the remarkable physicist who invented the cyclotron; Clark Kerr, who helped
develop the nation’s best statewide system of higher education; Mario Savio,
the leader of the radical Free Speech Movement during the turbulent 1960s; and
in our own day Alice Waters, arguably the nation’s greatest restaurateur.Another — too little known, at least beyond Northern California — is the
architect Bernard Maybeck, a precursor of the modern movement like Otto Wagner
in Vienna, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Victor Horta in Brussels and
the brothers Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena.Much that he saw and so brilliantly succeeded in grasping still stands
today in Berkeley, on and near the campus of UC Berkeley and in the hills
above it, in the north side neighborhood where Maybeck lived for most of his
life (1862-1957). More than anyone else, he made Berkeley one of the nation’s
architectural treasure-troves.
My single favorite writer on architectural and design issues is Ted Wells. Unlike here, where I’m constantly filling in the space between interesting issues with notes of very minor importance, Ted’s puts articles up on Living Simple only when he has something to say. He’s a really good writer and teacher (and designer, of course; that is his primary profession), and in my few conversations with him I’ve learned a lot about architecture and our responsibility to art.
Living Simple’s motto is "Do your work. Be honest. Keep your word. Help when you can. Be fair." Even when Ted is critical – as he sometimes is, especially of communities (and homeowners) who are unable or unwilling to maintain architectural and aesthetic responsibility or historic character through either a lack of education or simple greed, or historic homeowners who are dishonest or inattentive stewards of their homes – he is always fair, and takes his responsibilities seriously. He even writes on his personal website that his "most important job is helping guide the stewardship of notable historic architecture, art, built and natural landscapes, and thought and culture."
Ted has a new book coming out next year with Gibbs-Smith, one of the world’s best publishers of books on American architecture and design. Ted and John Ellis are currently finishing up work on the book, which is about the mid-century modernist architect Harwell Hamilton Harris. Twenty-two of Harris’ homes will be profiled in the book, which will be published next year.
The unpainted (or brown-painted) brown shingle is one of my favorite types of house. Usually taller than a one-story ground-hugging bungalow, built in either a Craftsman style or Western Stick variant (which often incorporates more rustic and cabin-like features, like rougher beam endings and less-symmetrical eaves), and are less often Craftsman-fied Queen Annes, with glossy trim and a bid of beadwork around the windows, these houses always seemed warm and friendly to me – partly because I grew up in Berkeley, CA, which is full of such homes, and partly because my father lives in a very warm & comfortable house built in this style. Some are raw wood or brown-painted wood shingle, others use wood siding or brown-painted wood siding; all share a sort of undecorated honesty of design. (There are also quite a few very modern brown shingles, built in the angular "Northern California" style that owes far more to Sea Ranch than Maybeck; these are mostly in the Eucalyptus woods of the upper Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco Hills, and while I am sure many of them are fine homes, they’re not especially interesting to me, or – I imagine – to you.)
Here are a number of attractive brown shingles for sale. As you can see, the style is most popular on the West Coast, specifically in the Bay Area; I doubt wood shingle would last nearly as long when exposed regularly to snow, wind and ice.
Carol Lloyd has a good article at SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle‘s site) on extremely tiny homes:
Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.
This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer,
who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming
next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage
and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern
California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office
space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and
magazines — many featuring his house on the cover. And from the
old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting:
an apple orchard in full bloom.But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better,
calling Shafer’s home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron.
Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square
feet — smaller than many people’s bathrooms. But Jay Shafer’s dream
isn’t of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then
writ tiny.
Read the whole thing.
So, I’ve created a map – using social-mapping tool Platial – of all the existing Greene & Greene properties I’ve been able to find record of. I’ll also be adding a new layer of no-longer-standing Greene & Greene projects, but that’s a few weeks off.Take a look, and let me know if you like this style of map and if the tool is easy to use; if so, I’ll revive our Craftsman Home Registry (above) using this, so you can all add your own homes.
A number of books which look like they’d be very interesting to Craftsman (and other old-home) aficionados have been released recently. I’ll try to get my hands on copies of some of these for full reviews. If you are a publisher and would like to have your book reviewed here, drop me a line.
by Molly Hyde English by Michael Snow by Jon Broome by the editors of Wood Magazine by William P. Spence by Susan Solakian by Sally Bevan by Roger Billcliffe by Edward S. Morse by Melba Levick by Ralph Kylloe by Judith Miller by Peter Labau by Joaquim Ballarin by Russell Versaci by Designs Direct Publishing by D. J. Waldie and Diane KeatonUrban Archaeology, with showrooms in Manhattan, Bridgehampton, Boston and Chicago, has been in the business of saving urban architectural treasures since they opened their Manhattan store in 1978.
In addition to a large stock of salvaged materials, they have also developed their own line of lighting, bath accessories, washstands and medicine cabinets based on popular historic designs.
As far as salvage goes, though, this is no scrapyard, but rather the highest end of the collectible architectural antique sellers.